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Sunday, January 24, 2016

It was hot today. And I don’t mean “Auckland hot”, I mean hot hot. The photo with this post is a screen grab of the readout from our weather station at 2:09pm. However, that wasn’t the peak temperature. Memo to self: Tell American folks not to visit in January.

For my American friends, 35.2 degrees is about 95.4F (and the “feels like 42” is 107.6F). Bad as that was, the highest temperature at our house was at 3:34pm: 36.9 (98.4F). Last night, it was barely below 15 (59F) all night, which is pretty warm for a night-time temperature.

This isn’t unusual for this time of year: January is often hot. For example, as mentioned in my previous post, it was incredibly hot on this day six years ago. January is the Southern Hemisphere equivalent of July in the Northern Hemisphere—full on summer, in other words.

I’m absolutely NOT complaining; I can hang out washing and have it dry in no time, for example—that's a great thing. But our air conditioning does struggle to keep up, and when it gets this hot it takes the house (the building) a fair while to cool down so that the air conditioning can relax a bit. Yeah, yeah, I know: First world problems.

I mention all of this only for one reason: So you can know what Auckland is like in January. Some people think that Auckland is always cool, or don’t believe it can actually get hot; our experience tends to disprove that. Even so, the official summer temperatures are almost always lower than what people actually experience, and that means that visitors have to be prepared for hotter summers than the official guidebooks suggest is “normal”.

In any event, I like hot weather for a (short) while—as long as I can retreat into air conditioning. This weather—like the winter weather that will follow—won’t last forever. But it’s fun to talk about it in the meantime.

Have I mentioned that it was hot today?

The photo above also has data on the inside conditions (at the bottom, with the white background). 24.2 inside temperature is equivalent to about 75.6F, though that temperature got hotter later, too.